This is one of those productions which
are bewilderingly less than the sum of their parts. It includes a
clutch of solid, even strong performances: my most significant
criticism in this respect would be that Tunji Kasim is rather too
callow for the scheming Edmund – his “gods stand up for bastards”
speech is close to being an adolescent snit. Yet David Farr’s
directorial vision of the play remains a mystery to me, except that
that it is bleak.

Jon Bausor’s design appears to locate the action in a derelict factory.
The cast are dressed in a combination of Edwardian, mediaeval and
generally depths-of-history: Edmund and his brother Edgar fight their
Act Five duel with huge broadswords despite the service revolver
holstered on Edmund’s Sam Browne belt, whilst Edgar is in armoured helm
and breastplate. The cumulative effect reminded me of a 1970s
science-fiction TV drama episode set on a post-industrial planet that
has since devolved into feudal warlordism. What this clash of epochs
may have to say about Shakespeare’s generational upheavals is beyond me.

Greg Hicks gives a characteristically detailed, thought-through reading
of Lear. The king is introspective in any case: he makes a number of
remarks anticipating his madness, almost as if living in dread of
losing his sanity. There are few pyrotechnics when he does finally
crack (apart from a ludicrously localised rain-shower), and his
final-act coda is likewise downplayed: this Lear delivers the line
“Howl, howl, howl, howl!” not as
a howl, but in a desolate bass-baritone. Some of Hicks’ touches are
misjudged: it’s all very well to play an older character by
deliberately stooping, but it is absurd to notice Hicks seeming a full
head shorter than Katy Stephens as his daughter Regan, and the opening
scene or two on press night showed a strange Henry Kissinger-like
tendency to voizze all hizz gonsonandz. (There are some general
intelligibility problems when actors are turned away from us, which I
have not hitherto noticed as an RSC phenomenon.)

Above all, there is little emotional or psychological range in the
world of the play. The walls of the factory disintegrate slab by slab
(ho-hum); lighting grows weaker and more washed-out; the final
restoration of order seems hollow, as if this were simply a drama of
entropy. But it is, or should be, so much more.